This is a great point and also very applicable to sales generally. There's definitely a continuum between "hyper target / completely customized" and "spray and pray" and each person/company needs to find the right point on that continuum for themselves.
My company actually just put out a blog post last week on this showing how to quickly create customized emails while still leveraging templates [0].
Spam like this earns an immediate "remove all email addresses from your lists @ourdomain.com and let me know that you are suppressing them from your future mailings", ccing your mail provider's abuse address. The second mail gets your domain blocked and I tell your provider they're on notice.
I recognize we start from different places on this, but unrequested email does not necessarily equal SPAM. We had a guy a few months ago who threatened all kinds of litigation and reporting etc. when we reached out cold. At the same time, one of his colleagues responded with interest and just before Christmas their company signed a 5-figure annual deal with our client to provide an endpoint security solution they needed for their managed services practice.
Put another way, if I honest to God had a gold bar with your name on it and contacted you by email to say "when can we meet up so I can give you this gold bar" and you replied and we met up and I gave you your gold bar, you wouldn't view my message as SPAM at all because now you have a gold bar that is worth a bunch of money. Hey, free gold bar!@ But when it comes to cold outreach many people defer to "I didn't ask for this email....SPAM SPAM SPAM!" Sometimes what's being offered isn't a good fit, doesn't provide ROI, etc. But sometimes it turns out to be a gold bar.
I don't think that a business reaching out and saying "You guys provide X, we have a solution that does Y and has helped other companies that provide X in a meaningful way" is remotely the same as a Nigerian Prince selling Viagra.
They are not the same, but if they're sent in bulk, they are both spam.
The essence of spam is using automation to use the same amount of your time to waste more of other people's time. Door-to-door sales is awful, but at the very least the waste of time is symmetrical. Computers, though, let spammers waste ever more of their targets' time on their quest to get rich.
Having talked to many spammers on the phone back in the day, excuses like yours are common. "I'm an exception! What I'm doing is special and valuable!" Sure, bud. We're all special snowflakes. But you don't really believe it's all that valuable, or you'd trust that people with a need would seek you out. Your actual goal is to manipulate people such that money goes into your pocket instead of somebody else's. Which I get, in that there are plenty of other people doing the same thing. It's an arms race, and not playing guarantees you don't win. But let's not pretend that your spam is somehow not spam.
Sure. I believe you don't understand. As Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it." If it made sense to you, you'd be doing something else.
Your patronization and condescension are not lost on me.
Without knowing anything about me, my work, and my company aside from what I've shared you've taken the time to behave like an utter jackass because you dont happen to like what you think I do for a living.
Know this: I love my job and the company I've built. My employees love working here and the problems we solve. The clients love the service we provide and their customers love that we helped them connect.
If there are a majority of my target niche companies that literally don't know my type of software exists, and it could help them, but having physical door to door salespeople would make the software more expensive than they'd be able to pay, what approach do you recommend?
For you? I'd say do whatever you think best. It's an imperfect world we're all trying to survive in. I mean, as ominvores, we only survive through the destruction of other life, which is kinda horrific. But it's not like there are great alternative choices. Meat is murder, but I'm still having ribs for dinner.
As I said, I don't think door-to-door sales is good either; it's just that the time cost is symmetric, so it's less abuseable. But it's still bothering people to get paid.
In a better world, people would find out what they need to know without manipulation. And that better world is partly here. If I know I need to buy a thing, I'll look at things like Wirecutter and Consumer Reports to get unbiased evaluations of things. If I know I have a problem but don't know a solution, I'll search, I'll read up, I'll consult forums like this one. And of course I read broadly so I can become aware of problems I don't realize I have yet.
But it's only partly here. So if that's not enough for you, well, do what you have to. My issue here isn't with people doing what it takes to get by. It's with people insisting we all pretend that there are no moral compromises involved.
It's spam. Using templates to automate mass sending of cold (read: unsolicited) emails is the definition of spam. Not all unsolicited emails are spam, like in the original article, but the article in that comment is demonstrating how to blast spam.
I've previously been in the position of having to review all spam (and other unwanted or suspicious emails) reported by employees at a large company. Every day. I've seen thousands of different spam messages that are essentially indistinguishable from this.
It's all the same. It's all spam. People don't like your spam. Most of them report it, and then people like me have to look at it every day, and nearly all of the rest of them delete it. Some tiny, tiny percentage will reply, but that's exactly how the viagra spammers work, too. They need to send massive volumes because the percentage that click or reply is so miniscule, and then the percentage of those who make a purchase are also miniscule.
I recommend finding something different to do with your career or life if your career or life is just spamming as many people as possible to try to convince them to do something they don't want to do. At the end of the day, is this truly what you want your infinitesimally small fraction of existence to be composed of?
Totally depends. A particularly industrious person could essentially be a human spam bot / template permuter.
It's too open to say definitively. How many people are contacted, how were they identified, how much unique effort went into each email, what is the actual content of the email, what are your intentions, what is your offering, what do you say you want from them, what do you actually want from them, etc.
If it's sent to 1 person, like in this article, it might be completely fine. But in general, I don't think there's any way to answer that without thoroughly looking at each case.
I agree. Early on we had clients who said "we have a list of 1,000 prospects we want to reach out to. How quickly can that be done?" My answer was usually "about a month, maybe longer." We like to research the prospect and their company, find a reason the offering might actually be useful, craft a message connecting those dots, then send an email or two and add in some phone calls.
We lost business that way, "Just send the template I give you..." THat's not a business I'm going to be in.
But I continue to disagree with the notion that cold outreach is SPAM, I'm amused that someone would tell me to do something else with my life, and I'm surprised that so many people are close-minded to how powerful and effective email-first cold outreach can be. We help businesses grow. We help our clients deliver value and service to other people, which in turn helps those other people's businesses grow. I'm sorry if any message I ever write ends up in your inbox and you think it's SPAM. But I assure you that a lot of thought was put into why you were contacted and the words chosen to try to get your attention.
What you're doing is certainly less spammy if it's actually hand-tailored to each recipient and their particular domain or requirements, and not based on a template.
Maybe I'm missing your or your clients' perspectives, but you you have to understand the perspectives of the recipients, too, and of people like me who see the aggregate of what they receive. Depending on someone's role, someone may receive emails of that nature from 5 - 20 or more companies every week. (Often involving more than 5 - 20 emails, since many are follow-ups.) Multiply 5 - 20 a week over years, and you might develop a certain attitude. And then when I have to look at tens of thousands of them per year (over 100,000 in total if you include any kind of reported email), over several years, I'm definitely going to develop a certain impression.
Depending on the company and product, an offering could apply very generally. For example, employees at our company would receive tons of cloud- and security-themed cold emails, and these would be addressed to anyone with any technology-related position. Pretty much every medium or large company is using the cloud in some way and cares about information security, so is the "correct" thing to do to blast the cold emails to the hundreds of thousands/millions of people who work in a technology role at any company above a certain size? How do you know where it ends?
I'll say it's better than constantly calling people's phones, at least, and if the follow-ups aren't that aggressive or frequent then it's just a minor nuisance, but mass marketing and advertising in general often just rub me the wrong way.
I agree that there is a difference between sales spam and scam spam.
This is why we provide the former with a warning before being blocked, while the latter gets no such courtesy. (We don't engage in legal threats over it, that's pointless and stupid.)
Honest question b/c I'm curious: does this mean that as a policy you won't engage with cold outreach regardless of what is being offered? And if so, do you ever consider that such a policy may indeed hinder your business?
A non-zero portion of unsolicited sales-based emails DO include something of meaningful value.
A non-zero portion of just about anything includes something of meaningful value to someone. This does not mean that sifting through it will yield value considering opportunity cost.
Given the volume of spam I get from would-be vendors, there probably has been something I could have used somewhere in there. Similarly, I've probably walked past storm drains with valuables in them. I don't dig in there either.
If some tool or service really is great, relevant and not something we already do/have, we won't have to read spam to find out about it.
I agree to a large degree, your analogy about storm drains is spot on. As a person that does cold outreach sales spam bothers me too because it makes the job harder for people that are doing valuable research and targeting their prospects with greater purpose.
I do, however, disagree that great or relevant service will present itself without a proactive salesperson.
It kind of does: you don't want it to arrive in your inbox. It is implementation detail how you arrive at that effect. Personally I find adding a silent filter to be superior option in most aspects: it is quicker and foolproof. Surely it won't "educate" the sender, but TBH I don't think your current method is doing so anyway.
I'm not connected to anyone else commenting here, just chiming in with another data point for you.
does this mean that as a policy you won't engage with cold outreach regardless of what is being offered?
How will we know what is being offered if we don't read the message or accept the call? Unless we've had prior contact with someone or they make contact through a trusted third party, we normally won't, we'll just block and move on.
And if so, do you ever consider that such a policy may indeed hinder your business?
No, not at all. We're quite happy doing our thing, and when we identify something that seems like we could do it better, we're quite happy going out and actively looking for ways we could improve it. If someone wants our business, by far the best way to win it is simply to have a good, no-nonsense website so we can find them if we're looking.
Fair points all. But what if you dont know what you are looking for? What if you dont know that the way you are doing things now can be done significantly faster, better, or with less cost?
I used to work for a large managed WordPress provider in their early days. The vast majority of people we talked to said "I had no idea this was available. For $x dollars you are saving me Y hours of time each month, Y hours that I'm doing work that I absolutely hate and probably am not good at."
But what if you dont know what you are looking for? What if you dont know that the way you are doing things now can be done significantly faster, better, or with less cost?
That's a possibility that we accept, but the simple truth is that we're OK with it. We keep an eye on our industry and we have a decent professional network. We think the odds of something that really could revolutionize our business going unnoticed for long are slim.
This philosophy isn't just about emails or calls. We're similarly allergic to other time-wasters, such as websites full of vacuous waffle and nothing but "call us" for pricing. If we're actively looking for something but a potential supplier doesn't have easy ways to contact them and transparent terms and pricing, most of the time we're just going to move on without giving them a second thought.
Again, we accept that we might miss out on a genuinely valuable opportunity, but we're OK with not finding that one if it means we also don't get tied up in spammy enterprise sales engines for the rest. I operate mostly in the world of SMEs, where time is precious and the business's finances often have a direct effect on its people. If someone wants our business and has a useful product or service, the best thing they can do is be findable when we look for something like that and then be easy to work with.
If not email, then what kinds of alternative methods do you find acceptable/permissible for someone to connect with you in an effort to introduce you to a new product or service?
An informative blog post which solves or helps with a problem I am experience, and plugs your service at the end.
A more direct approach of an offer of something of value in exchange for my time (e.g. pay $$ to beta test this for a week).
In general, the more the method of getting my attention requires a non-fakeable demonstration of value, the more likely I am to pay attention to it and the less likely it is to bother me.
I actually thought long ago of a platform that gave vendors a place to pay people to demo software. Like "$10 gift card for 15 minutes of your time." Problem is that most companies strictly prohibit their workers receiving outside compensation. Many companies would gladly pay prospects to engage.
In the case of a larger business, the content-marketing approach (or really any other approach that generates warm leads for your sales team) is probably a better way to approach things. I know that my company uses something on the order of 20 SAAS products, all of which we found by looking for a solution to a specific problem we were facing and either running across the product directly, across a post by that company explaining how to solve the problem and plugging their product for similar problems, or getting a recommendation by an internal dev who had used the product before or a third party that did not stand to significantly gain by us using that product. That last channel is actually the largest, but not really actionable for you as a sales person.
Do you know or have you ever in your professional career worked for a company that employed salespeople? Do you understand that they mostly do cold outreach to generate revenue? If all the salespeople were to disappear overnight from that present or past employer, what would happen to company revenue and how many people would lose their jobs?
> have you ever in your professional career worked for a company that employed salespeople?
Yes.
> Do you understand that they mostly do cold outreach to generate revenue?
No, they do not.
> If all the salespeople were to disappear overnight, what would happen to company revenue and how many people would lose their jobs?
The point you're illustrating is that in a world where some companies have sales people, all companies need to have sales people (although not for cold outreach). In the same way as "well some people have guns so I need to have a gun too" isn't a good argument against gun control, you are not making a good argument for cold outreach / salespeople.
How do they generate business then, if not cold outreach? I don't mean it as a gotcha, I'm genuinely curious. I suppose you could say inbound leads, but I don't really believe that's a significant % of revenue, and anyways HN seems to hate marketing.
The gun analogy doesn't really work man, having salespeople isn't really predicated on what other companies are doing or not doing
> How do they generate business then, if not cold outreach?
There are tons of ways to get warm interest, whether that's permission to email, a conversation with a salesperson, or a request for more info. Some obvious examples are content marketing (with a way to provide your email for a mailing list and/or account), trial downloads, product tours/webinar registrations, trade show booths, and user group sponsorships.
Literally any interaction except emailing a complete stranger can, and often does, lead to someone giving a salesperson or a company permission to contact them.
(Related: Needing to guess who needs a product, email them out of the blue, and be wrong 50-99% of the time, is often a sign that the company is failing at marketing. Generating warm leads is not hard.)
With the exception of trade shows, I call that 'marketing' though, that's an entirely different department. Everything else you've mentioned does not fall into the sales/BD category. Which is fine, I know some companies do not have or need a sales staff at all- I'm just commenting on the ones that do. If they have sales or business development in their job titles, they are probably reaching out to strangers a decent amount.
You don't really need outbound sales folks for B2C, but 95%+ of the time you do for B2B/enterprise
That's fair, but marketing's main job is to find prospective customers. In a successful organization, marketing and sales scale roughly in lockstep, so marketing is generating enough warm leads for sales.
One can debate how warm/qualified they need to be - and sales and marketing teams do - but the answer isn't "They've expressed no interest at all and might not have ever heard of us."
Your comment applies to cold emails to strangers, too: that's marketing, not sales. It's ineffective, often expensive marketing because it's performed by people with the wrong skill set and goals. Generalizing, a company doing that has over-invested in sales and under-invested in marketing.
I can only speak for the businesses I have been involved in (software, product marketing for software, marcomms, real estate), but cold outreach -- if done at all -- would be the longest of long tails: low conversion, increasingly high maintenance (esp. because folks like me send petulant ICO/GDPR subject access requests to clog up organisations sending unsolicited emails).
So speculative cold outreach is crazy inefficient and frankly not on-brand for most companies (yes, eastern European outsource software teams can do it, but e.g. AWS can't).
Most companies look to qualify their leads by having some degree of engagement: whether it's impressions > clicks > landing page. They might do this in addition to cold outreach, but the companies I've worked for (and started) focused on marketing (SEM, TV, print, radio, trade shows, PR, networking events). All of these generate either inbound or permission-based selling: if you're attending a trade show or responding to a TV advert, then you're giving us implicit permission to talk to you.
We are not sending an invasive message into your inbox which is a personal place, whether it's a corporate or personal inbox.
Marketing is effective - especially at the point of intent (e.g. when someone Googles "buying new motorcycle helmet" rather than just "motorcycle helmet") and not dumb/broadcast.
The gun analogy illustrates: if you removed all sales people from all organisations, then nobody would need any salespeople: companies would still have needs for e.g. software and would still find companies through marketing. It wouldn't result in companies losing revenue. OP (not sure if it was you or not) was conflating marketing and sales.
>then you're giving us implicit permission to talk to you
Certainly. Although I'm guessing that at least some of the people on this thread most objecting to cold outreach would still classify something like an email after getting a badge scan at a trade show as spam. You're right that lead acquisition happens in a lot of ways other than the spam I get in my inbox offering to sell me address lists. However, a lot of people still get mad at emails that are the result of casual interactions. Honestly, it's the way the business world works but people are still going to object to it.
>The gun analogy illustrates: if you removed all sales people from all organisations, then nobody would need any salespeople: companies would still have needs for e.g. software and would still find companies through marketing. It wouldn't result in companies losing revenue. OP (not sure if it was you or not) was conflating marketing and sales.
And then some company would figure out that, at least for certain types of products, having someone who directly cultivates a relationship with buyers is a really effective way to increase revenues relative to the competition.
And IMO they are totally right to do so. That behaviour is so ludicrously dumb that I can't believe people do it. Your company is exhibiting in a room full of potential customers. If someone doesn't come and talk to you then you have no right to reach out to them IMO.
> a lot of people still get mad at emails that are the result of casual interactions
Hey, if I gave someone my email address that's fine. I expect them to contact me. If I gave a conference organiser my email address, I do not expect the exhibitors to be able to contact me.
> And then some company would figure out…
For sure. But OP's point seemed to be that money stops being spent in a world without sales people. It's an interesting thought experiment. My hunch is that the same money is spent: sales people are not, in general, getting more spend out of customers overall. Salesman X might get Customer Y to spend more money with _their particular company_, but not money that would not have been deployed in the market anyway.
I'm talking about spam. And I do indeed want spammers to do something else for a living - making spam economically nonviable is the strategic intent of suppressing it.
How do you propose that the salespeople, without whom your employer or employers would go bankrupt, reach out to new prospects? How would that work? Am genuinely curious. By definition it seems to involve cold outreach of some type
I don't manage sales people; telling them how to do their job isn't my job. I can suggest that if the lack of a single communications channel would be crippling for you, you're already in a pretty precarious place and should maybe think about that.
As for what you appear to believe is your gotcha, we don't have sales people, because our business doesn't work that way. I have worked for firms that did, though, and strangely, they somehow managed to do their jobs without spamming.
You seem to define all cold outreach whatsoever as 'spam', so of course you can choose to fit anything into that category. If people contacted you cold via other communications channels, it seems like you would define that as spam as well.
Seeing as you don't manage sales people, I would gently suggest that at your old firms they were reaching out to people, cold, one way or another. That's literally what the job is
In many cases "sales people" (at least outside sales people) are not cold calling. They're getting qualified leads from digital marketing campaigns.
However, your basic point stands. I get that some people don't want cold outreach through any channel, ads, etc. While there may be some companies that can organically grow through maybe a combination of organic search, stories being written about them (at which point someone here will dutifully post a link about submarine PR), word of mouth, etc. I'd respectfully suggest that most companies that try to do so will be out of business in a very short period of time.
Like I said upstream, I am talking about spam. If you want to make shit up and attack that instead, I don't have to be involved, so I'm done with this.
My company actually just put out a blog post last week on this showing how to quickly create customized emails while still leveraging templates [0].
[0] https://blaze.today/blog/best_sales_cold_email_templates_and...